Conventionally, in regard to consideration of character codes, a correspondence between an area length (for example, the number of bytes) of character data and a size of field in a display screen, a form, or the like is determined at a pattern. For example, alphabets, numbers, and katakana without voiced sound symbol are expressed by an area length of one half-sized byte. Japanese characters are expressed by an area length of two full-sized bytes. Katakana with voiced sound symbol is indicated by an area length of two half-sized bytes (one byte+one byte=two bytes). These area lengths coincide with the size of field in the display screen, the form, or the like. In this way, in a business application that treats characters, the size of field in the form and the size of character data treated in the application are declared to adjust the size of the area of the field and a display size of the character data. Therefore, a developer or the like of the business application that treats characters develops the business software without regard to the adjustment between the display size of the character data and the size of the field where the character data is outputted.
Meanwhile, Unicode (UTF16) has appeared as a character code that can treat all characters defined in JIS 2004, and an environment of handling one Japanese character in area lengths of two bytes and four bytes is started to be widely used. In the environment using UTF16, the developer or the like of the business application that treats the characters also can use UTF32 for encoding of input character data to design character data treated in area lengths of two bytes and four bytes in a fixed length of four bytes per character.
For more information, see “Unicode,” [searched on Feb. 5, 2013], Internet, <URL:https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>